A Spanking-New Savior for Printed Magazines: Stormy Daniels

Stormy's booty basher?

The U.S. magazine industry got a real shot in the, um, arm Sunday night when Stormy Daniels confirmed that she had spanked future-President Donald Trump with a magazine that bore his picture on the cover.

Her revelation on “60 Minutes” broke the Internet, as millions of Americans who had abandoned printed magazines suddenly clamored for a UV-coated tush whacking.

Egotistical millionaires (is there any other kind?) this week have been offering to pay out the – uh, big bucks – for publishers to put their faces on a cover. Inspired by The Donald, they’re having their own #MeToo moment, desperate to drop trou for an “adult sophisticate” star who will give their porculent posteriors a periodicals paddling.

Confused Trump fans are joining the craze, buying up any magazine that looks as if it might have details on how Stormy toasted the underwear-clad Fuehrer’s buns.Wait ‘til they find out that North American Whitetail is about deer, not derrieres.

Not whacking material

Publishers seeking to capitalize on the excitement are already engaged in a race to the bottom with rebranding campaigns. Car buffs will soon be able to get their rear bumpers bashed with Road & Whack.

Anagram-loving golfers will be rolling up Flog Digest, while red-cheeked adventurers peruse Conde Nasty Traveler. Christianity Today will publish Christianity OK, for all those evangelicals who’ve forgotten the Ten Commandments and see no evil in Trump's actions.

Forbes is rushing back to press, my sources tell me, with the 2006 issue that Stormy supposedly used to deliver the news. Melania has pre-ordered a special edition that comes with an embedded Taser.

But with new evidence that Stormy’s ham slammer was actually a copy of Trump magazine, plans are already being made to relaunch the defunct title as tRUMP.

The real tRUMP buster?

Mr. Tree is especially ecstatic to report that the ill-fated Rosie magazine will be back, this time as Rosie Cheeks. That’ll get my spank on.

There’s even talk of a certain yellow-bordered magazine-media icon becoming National Pornographic.

(Editor’s note: With its stiff paper and tight binding, National Geographic is hard to roll into a proper crack plasterer. Those with tiny hands – I’m not naming any names – will prefer something thinner like Shorts Illustrated for delivering the blessed moonshot.)

Magazines – real, printed magazines – are of course the perfect tool for smackin’ the donkey. You can’t roll up a book the way you can a magazine.

Spank me, Rosie!

Newspapers are too flimsy. Besides, the ink tends to rub off, leading to messy fingerprints, which could be a real problem if you decide to, say, declare Chapter 11 four times and then run for president 10 years from now.

(Some newspapers claim to use low-rub ink. I’m all for low rubbing – but with ink?)

The web has been kicking magazines in the can for more than a decade. But now that Americans are rediscovering the joys of a four-color thwack on the gluteus maximus, we’ll be able to show that digital whippersnapper who’s the boss.

A real knockout

There is one downside: There may be calls to include warning labels on magazines. Consider that Stormy said she “just gave him a couple swats,” but “from that moment on he was a completely different person.” That sounds good at first.

But considering Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior, I’m thinking Stormy must have slapped his booty so hard it gave him a concussion.


Further proof that Mr. Tree has perverse fascinations with magazines as sexual objects, magazines about Trump – and with Rosie:

• Sexy Slogans With a Bite 
• Censor Me: The Magazine Slogans That Were Too Hot for Publishing Executive 
• For Magazines, This Will Be the Summer of Trump 
• Rosie's Great Speckled Bird 

 

On the 5th Birthday of Dead Tree Edition, It's Time To Reveal the Real D. Eadward Tree

Five years and 601 articles ago today, a magazine-publishing veteran took on the identity of D. Eadward Tree and launched the Dead Tree Edition blog.

Rarely has the blog focused on Mr. Tree himself, under the assumption that the 700,000-plus unique visitors (some more unique than others) who have visited over the years were looking mostly for advice, insight, or maybe even entertainment. But the true identity of Mr. Tree has become a subject of great speculation and discussion in some publishing and printing circles, prompting a few of the blog’s followers to request that Dead Tree Edition celebrate its fifth birthday by spilling the beans.

A thorough reading of all 601 of those articles provides many hints as to Mr. Tree’s identity. It’s also a great cure for insomnia, unless you are that rare bird who happens to share all of Mr. Tree’s obsessions – such as making print more environmentally friendly, getting accurate benefits information to potential U.S. Postal Service retirees, reforming the way USPS calculates the cost of Periodicals mail, exposing “black liquor” government subsidies to U.S. pulp mills, and battling “go paperless” greenwash.

So to save you the trouble, here are some clues we dug up about Mr. Tree from his writings:

In 2010, a postal executive startled a meeting of postal officials and mailers’ representatives by announcing that Mr. Tree was none other than Patrick R. Donahoe, then the #2 man at USPS. Five months later, Donahoe became Postmaster General. A coincidence? You decide.

A couple of months later came another clue – that Mr. Donahoe, aka Mr.Tree, had starred in those “If it fits, it ships” Postal Service commercials. But Mr. Tree soon pooh-poohed that by claiming he was actually married to a prominent publishing-industry pundit.

Confused yet? Just wait.

Only a Jew could have written this headline: Call a mohel, this baby's growing!. But the article Re-Righting The Bible: No More Namby-Pamby Peacemaking suggests a familiarity with the New Testament that only a Christian would have. And articles like Playboy and Virgin Fail to Hook Up suggest a total lack of spirituality.

An object of fantasies?

What’s clear is that he works in the magazine industry and is a self-described “print guy” (even a printing geek) and “an environmentalist who buys a lot of paper.” But he’s definitely not part of what he calls “the New York publishing elite.”

His LinkedIn profile places him in Hawaii, which should narrow things down a lot. But he claimed in an interview that the Hawaiian thing was a (lame) joke and that he actually inhabits a parallel universe.

He hangs around bookstores and doesn’t date Cosmo readers, he told us three years ago. And regarding a magazine cover of Rosie O’Donnell that has now appeared three times on Dead Tree Edition, we note Mr. Tree’s comment, “Hubba, hubba, Rosie in a bathrobe!” Perhaps a glimpse of his secret, twisted fantasies?

In early 2010 he revealed that he has a nephew – and an apparent appreciation for James Brown. An article he wrote last year for Publishing Executive magazine pays homage to The Who (See me, Sniff me, Touch me, Peel me) and Madonna. And the opening sentence of his next PubExec article ripped off “should threaten to undo us” from Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress.”

Rather diverse musical tastes for one person, wouldn’t you say?

Has it ever occurred to you that Mr. Tree is confused about his own identity?

My Heartfelt Apology to the Publishing Industry

Let me offer my deepest apologies to everyone who, like me, works in the magazine publishing industry. I’ve been committing an unpardonable sin without even knowing it.

From time to time when I wasn’t covering my usual obsessions – like the U.S. Postal Circus, black liquor tax credits, and greenwashing – I have actually written about and even opined about our industry, often focusing on major New York publishers. I thought somehow that having worked many years (too many years) in the industry and having the benefit of insights from a host of brilliant and well-informed insiders qualified me to speak about the business occasionally.

But I’ve discovered in the past few days that all wisdom about magazines emanates from the New York publishing elite. And I’ve learned about the unwritten rule that only members of that elite may pontificate about the publishing industry.

Rosie's salute to NY publishing

The revelations started last week with coverage of the proposed Meredith merger/takeover of most Time Inc. publications. Hick that I am, I saw real potential in the move. Meredith, a smart company that uses its strength in publications for women as a springboard into new ventures, would take on Time brands serving a similar audience.

How foolish of me! New York media reporters soon set me straight, pointing out that Meredith is based in Des Moines. Like, Iowa. Like, in the middle of The Flyover (which is how the Beautiful People refer to that cultural wasteland you

OMG! I Was Only Kidding, Not Psychic : Twitter as Person of the Year?

A few months ago, I joked that Twitter was “no doubt [Time] magazine’s leading candidate for Bird of the Year”. Now, it’s no joke.

Three of six panelists at a Time Inc. event Thursday night voted for Twitter as the top candidate for Person of the Year, Folio: reports. The other three voted for another non-human, The Economy, which seems like last year’s news: Anyone who was surprised by The Economy in 2009 wasn’t paying attention more than a year ago when the financial system was circling the drain.

If Time’s going to feature old news for Person of the Year, it might as well go with Obama again. One magazine executive jokes that Obama is “the new Jesus” because putting him on the cover does wonders for newsstand sales, just as a Christianity cover around Easter or Christmas always sells well for magazines like Time. (The latest word on the President, by the way, is that after blowing up balloons for one of his daughter’s birthday parties, he’s being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics.)

Panelist Bahbwa Walters suggested an interesting competitor for Bird of the Year – jailbird Bernie Madoff. Nope. If you’re going to go the evil route, select someone really evil – like maybe the Microsoft sadists who invented Vista or the idiot at Geico who decided to give less air time to the gecko so they could run those awful cavemen ads.

Speaking of Bird of the Year, some folks in the magazine business already awarded that informally to Rosie magazine back in 2001 for its infamous staph infection cover. (Hubba, hubba, Rosie in a bathrobe!). It sure looks as if that bandaged hand is flipping the Great Speckled Bird to the millions of former McCall’s subscribers who had recently been involuntarily switched over to her magazine.

For the record, I’m still using Google Reader instead of Twitter to track favorite Web sites and have only tweeted to my 53 followers about the newly posted articles. I should note that a few of those followers were clearly trying to get me to follow them in return so they could pelt me with Twitter spam. (What, by the way, do you call tweets that resemble spam? Twam? Spitter? Shredded tweet? Bird poop?)

As for Bird of the Year, I’d vote for the AFLAC duck if he’d start showing up more in magazine ads. Especially in my magazines.

Related articles:

• Twitter vs. RSS: So Much for Superior Technology 
• Poe-Tweet for Twitter Quitters, which features a 140-character poem about why so many people quit Twitter.